The Medieval Additions Examined

But along with the genuine and trustworthy material, the compiler has taken in much that is unsupported and in many cases unlikely in itself, and even some things that can be shown to be untrue.

To the class of the improbable, the fiction of the saints’ lives or the growth of myth, belong the miracles so freely credited to Ephraim and the miraculous events said to have attended his career. It is worth noting that Ephraim himself never claims supernatural powers, though no doubt he believed that he received divine messages in dreams or visions. Nor does Gregory, in his speech of praise, credit him with any such powers, except in the case of the rich friend who, for his misguided zeal, was handed over to an evil spirit, and who, when he repented, was set free through Ephraim’s intercession. The voice that came from his father’s idol, foretelling his future war on idolatry; the answer of the newborn baby that cleared him of a slander; the crowned phantom on the walls of Nisibis that frightened off the besiegers; the plague of insects that drove them into a disastrous flight; the angel sent to call him back to Edessa when he had fled from it; the storm calmed and the sea monster killed at his word on the voyage to Egypt; the monk he set free at one stroke from possession by a demon and from heresy; the sudden gift of tongues that let him speak Coptic with Bishoi and Greek with Basil; the youth who had died of a viper’s bite at Samosata, brought back to life; the paralyzed man healed at the church door in Edessa; the record of guilt that vanished from the scroll on which the penitent woman of Caesarea had written her confession: all these belong to the later growth of legend that springs up naturally over the tomb of a saint. Some of them can safely be set aside as pure invention. Others probably come from figures of speech mistaken for literal statements, or from rhetorical enlargement that cast a false color of the supernatural over ordinary events. Most of them, moreover, show clear signs that the compiler dressed them up to look falsely like the miracle stories of the Old and New Testaments, the stories of God’s dealings with prophets and apostles, with Elisha, Jonah, Saint Peter and Saint Paul, or even like the mighty works that bore witness to our Lord’s own mission on earth. In reading these, one cannot help feeling painfully the irreverence of the parody, though the narrator seems quite unaware of it. It is worth noting that some even of the incidents in the Life that are not miraculous seem to have been handled the same way. So the account of Ephraim’s stoning outside Edessa seems to be modeled on that of Saint Paul at Lystra (Acts 14, verses 19 and 20); and the madness he pretended in order to escape the call to be a bishop seems to be borrowed from the story of how David behaved before Achish and his servants at Gath (First Samuel 21, verses 13 to 15).

Further, even when we have set aside everything in the Life that seems exaggerated, invented or mythical, much remains in it that, when examined critically, turns out to need correcting or to deserve rejection. We go on to deal with some questions that bear on the historical reliability of its narrative.

The pagan parents the Life gives Ephraim, and with them the whole story of his conversion to Christianity and the troubles that followed from it, can be dismissed without hesitation. They cannot be reconciled with his own words in the twenty-sixth of his hymns Against Heresies: “I was born in the way of truth. Though as a boy I did not understand how great the blessing was, I knew it when trial came.” And again, more plainly, if we may trust a Confession that survives only in Greek: “I had been taught about Christ early by my parents. Those who were my parents in the flesh had trained me in the fear of the Lord. … My parents were confessors before the judge; yes, I am of the kindred of martyrs.”

In the Life’s account of the siege of Nisibis, and especially of the presence and intercession of Saint Jacob the bishop, there is confusion and serious error. It is certain that in the reign of Constantius, from 337 to 361, Sapor besieged Nisibis three times. The siege during which Saint Jacob was inside the city took place in the year 338, and he died the same year. Sapor’s attempt to use the dammed-up waters of the Mygdonius to destroy its walls belongs to a later siege, the third, in the year 350, twelve years after Jacob’s death. These two sieges are expressly recorded in the Paschal Chronicle, also called the Alexandrian Chronicle, which Theophanes follows in his Chronography; Theophanes also mentions briefly the siege between them, in 346. The account given by the first of these chroniclers, who wrote in the seventh century, rests on the authority of a letter written by Valgesh, bishop of Nisibis in 350, whom Ephraim praises in five of the Nisibene Hymns contained in the present volume, Hymns 13 to 17. Other evidence from the time, fuller and at first hand, to the same effect, comes from two widely different sources. As already hinted, here the Apostate is at one with the champion of the faith.

In his second Oration, addressed probably in the year 358 to Constantius, who was then emperor, Julian describes the siege in even fuller detail than our biographer. He places it after the death of Constans, which took place in January of the year 350, and so confirms the date given by the Paschal chronicler and by Theophanes. According to Julian’s account, the embankment Sapor built, the work of four months, was laid out so as to surround the whole circuit of Nisibis. The river, held back by it, “formed a lake in the middle of which the city stood like an island,” with “the battlements of its walls barely showing above the surrounding waters.” On the surface of this encircling lake he launched armed boats and floating siege engines. With these the fortifications were battered without a break for several days, until suddenly the river, which was then in flood, burst its barrier and carried away not only the embankment but about a hundred and fifty feet of the city wall. Through the breach this made, Sapor pushed his cavalry forward to lead the advance on the city, which seemed to lie at his mercy. But they could not overcome the ground in between, torn up and flooded as it was by the torrent and crossed besides by an old moat, while the people of Nisibis, with the energy their deadly danger gave them, rained missiles on the attackers as they struggled to push on. The Persian next sent in his elephants; but their clumsy bulk only added to the panic and confusion and completed the disaster of his defeat. And when he made ready the next morning to renew the assault, he found himself facing a new wall, hastily raised in the night to fill the gap in the ramparts. It already stood six feet high, and it was manned by fresh and well-armed defenders. Despairing of success against such stubborn resistance, he raised the siege on which he had spent so much time, labor, treasure and blood in vain, and withdrew in disgrace.

There is no need to add that Julian’s account shows no trace of the miraculous incidents of the siege told in the Life. The only Providence he sees in the successful defense of Nisibis is the one he credits to his imperial kinsman, to whom his fawning oratory is addressed.

Of the leading facts as Julian relates them, full confirmation will be found in the first three of the Nisibene Hymns mentioned above. In the first, Ephraim has Nisibis herself tell the story of her danger. She compares herself to the ark of the flood, surrounded not, like the ark, by waters only, but by “mounds and weapons and waves” (Hymn 1, stanza 3). But the wall had not yet given way (the same hymn, stanzas 6 and 8), for he still speaks of it as standing and prays that it may go on standing. So this hymn was written while the siege was still going on. In the second hymn he celebrates her rescue and the way it came about: the very breach in her walls turned into triumph by their rebuilding (Hymn 2, stanzas 5 and 7), and the assault of the besiegers with their elephants (the same hymn, stanzas 17, 18 and 19) beaten back in disgrace and ending in immediate retreat. In the third hymn he follows similar lines, and adds a point that he thought significant: whereas the wall fell on the Sabbath, it was raised again on the Lord’s day, the day of the resurrection (Hymn 3, stanza 6). In all three hymns it is implied or stated again and again that this was the third siege of Nisibis (Hymn 1, stanza 11; Hymn 2, stanzas 5 and 19; Hymn 3, stanzas 11 and 12), and further, as it seems, the third time a breach had been made in her walls (Hymn 1, stanza 11; Hymn 2, stanza 19). In later hymns too (Hymn 11, stanzas 14 and 15; Hymn 13, stanza 17) the dammed river, bursting out and breaking down the city’s defenses, appears more than once. From one of these we learn in passing that the Mygdonius flowed past Nisibis, not through it (Hymn 13, stanzas 18 and 19). It follows that the Life’s description of how the Persian engineers used the river waters against the walls must be set aside wherever it differs from Julian’s account as the hymns confirm it.

It is remarkable how closely these two accounts agree in every essential point. Both date from the time of the events they describe; yet they come to us from sources that are not only independent of each other but even hostile to each other, and in forms so little suited to exact statement as hymns of thanksgiving and speeches of praise. When we leave out Ephraim’s devout ascriptions of praise to God from his stanzas, and the gushing flattery of the emperor from Julian’s polished sentences, what remains of plain fact is much the same in each. The main outlines of the story, told or implied, are the same in both writers; each, without knowing it, bears witness to the truthfulness of the other. Both are further confirmed, in large part, by the account of this siege in the Paschal Chronicle mentioned above, which, as already said, rests on information drawn from a written record left by Valgesh. He was bishop of Nisibis at the time, and Ephraim (Hymn 13, stanza 17) credits his prayers with the speedy repair of the breach in the city wall.

In confusing this siege, of 350, in the time of Valgesh, with the earlier one, of 338, in the time of Jacob, our biographer, like most later writers down to the eighteenth century, was misled by following the account in Theodoret’s Church History (Book 2, chapter 30). The Life’s account of the siege is in fact a mere copy of Theodoret’s, somewhat shortened and slightly varied. From Theodoret the Life also takes its reckoning of the length of the siege as only twenty days, a period plainly too short for the huge engineering works, for which the four months Julian gives are certainly not too much; and from him too it takes its description of how those works were done and what they aimed at. In Theodoret, likewise, are found the two supernatural incidents of Sapor’s defeat, both repeated in the Life, neither of which Ephraim states or even hints at, any more than Julian does: the appearance of the imperial phantom on the wall, and the plague of insects sent in answer to Jacob’s prayer, or, as the Life has it, to Ephraim’s. Of these, the first, but not the second, appears in the Paschal Chronicle, and, in an exaggerated form, in Theophanes. Whether in this case the chronicler’s statement, which is cautiously worded, or any core of it, came from the letter of Valgesh, or whether he borrowed it from Theodoret or from one of Theodoret’s sources or some such authority, is a matter of guesswork.

The Life is badly wrong, as already noted, in making Constans, who died in 350 and never reigned in the East, the successor of his brother Constantius, who lived until 361.

Ephraim’s stay of eight years in Egypt, after he had made his home in Edessa and before his visit to Cappadocia, is impossible. It was in July of the year 363 that Jovian surrendered Nisibis to Persia, and this, as the Life (no doubt rightly) says, was the cause of Ephraim’s final departure from that city to Beth-Garbaia, from there to Amid, and finally, “at the end of the year,” to Edessa. It follows that he did not reach Edessa until 364. In Edessa, or in his cell on the nearby “Mount,” according to the Life, he lived, worked, wrote commentaries and controversial discourses, taught, and formed a school of disciples, before his alleged journey to Egypt. So the Life implies that he spent years in or near Edessa before he set out on that journey, which therefore cannot be placed as early as 365. Even if we give it the improbably early date of 366, the eight years in Egypt bring us to 374, or 373 at the earliest, for his visit to Caesarea in Cappadocia. Now the prevailing weight of testimony is that Ephraim died in 373, and that date, if accepted, leaves no time for the events of his life after his return to Edessa. This, however, cannot be pressed against our biographer, who, as will be shown, assumes that he lived until 379. But the Life presents him as living in or near Edessa during the persecution the city suffered from the emperor Valens, which, as stated earlier, probably took place in 371, and certainly not later than 372, a date at which, according to the biographer, he was still in Egypt. In fact, even without going into details, it is plain that between Ephraim’s arrival in Edessa in 364 and the persecution of Valens in 370 to 372, the eight years’ stay in Egypt and the visit to Cappadocia would so fill the time between as to leave no room for the long residence at Edessa, before and after that stay, which the Life, like all other authorities, gives to Ephraim, and because of which his name is bound up for good with the history of Edessa.

If, with the Vatican version of the Life, we read “Julian” instead of Valens as the name of the persecutor of Edessa, the impossibility becomes even more absurdly glaring. For Julian died in 363, and before that year Ephraim had not moved from Nisibis to Edessa.

It is no doubt possible that Ephraim visited Egypt, as the Life says, before going on to Caesarea. As an anchorite he would naturally be drawn to the land where the anchorite life began and reached its greatest development. Yet it is hardly likely that, eager as he was to see Basil at Caesarea, he would have headed first for Egypt when he set out on his travels, a country so far away and lying in so different a direction from Cappadocia. This unlikelihood would naturally not strike our biographer, who seems to have supposed that Basil’s Caesarea, if he had any clear idea at all of where it was, was the coastal city of that name in Palestine. One can hardly help suspecting that this whole story of the visit to Egypt, unknown as it is to every authority except our Life (in both its versions) and the shorter form of the same Life, may have been invented by some compiler or reviser writing in, or for, one of the Egyptian monasteries of the Nitrian Desert, who wanted to please the Syrian ascetics, numerous in that region, by making it the scene of an episode in the life of the most famous of Syrian ascetics. It certainly has the look of an insertion, coming as it does between the description of Ephraim’s longing to see Basil and the story of how that longing was fulfilled by his visit to Caesarea. More particularly, as to the story of Ephraim’s visit to the Nitrian saint Pesoës, or Bishoi, note that it appears not in the Paris version of the Life but only in the Vatican manuscript. It is a telling fact that this manuscript, our only written authority for the alleged visit, was written, probably about the year 1100, in the Nitrian monastery of “Amba Bishoi,” that is, of Saint Pesoës. On the other hand, it should be added that a tradition of Ephraim’s stay in Egypt, linking him with Pesoës, lingered in quite recent times, and probably still lingers, among the monks of the Nitrian region, Syrian and Coptic. Travelers of the seventeenth and even the eighteenth century tell of a tamarind tree that was shown to them within the grounds of the Syrian Monastery of the Bearer of God in that region. It was said to have grown from Ephraim’s staff, which he set in the ground on his arrival there, as he was about to enter the cell of Pesoës. This legend of the staff, which reminds one of the staff of Saint Joseph of Arimathea and the Glastonbury thorn tree, probably grew out of the belief that Ephraim once visited the monastery; and that belief in turn may have begun with the pious fiction of the compiler of the Life in its Vatican form, or of the one who inserted the story into it. It is easy to imagine how gladly a community of Syrian monks in this Egyptian solitude would listen to what claimed to be a record of the greatest of Syrian monks, a recluse like themselves, the author of the Sermons to Ascetics they had read or heard read, and of the many hymns that enriched their services and quickened their devotion; and how ready they would be to welcome as fact the story of his stay in their valley, and to imagine that a memorial of it survived among the trees of their garden.

The gap of four years or more that the Life seems to put between Ephraim’s return from Caesarea to Edessa and the persecution of the people of Edessa by Valens is likewise impossible. For all agree that at Caesarea Ephraim found Basil as archbishop. But Basil was consecrated late in 370, and so Ephraim’s first meeting with him, which was on the feast of the Epiphany, cannot be placed earlier than January of the year 371. But the persecution probably took place in 371, or at the latest in 373, which cuts the possible gap down to two years at most, and probably to a few months. It may be said, however, that the biographer, though he tells of the persecution after mentioning the four-year gap, does not mean that it came after that gap in time. But it will be shown further on, under the next heading, that the four-year gap cannot be allowed whatever the date of that persecution, since Ephraim lived only three years after his visit to Basil.

The story of the lady whom Basil sent to Ephraim, and whom Ephraim sent back to Basil, only in time to see his body, and of Ephraim’s grief at Basil’s death, cannot be accepted unless we set aside the consent of the chronologers, who agree that Ephraim died in 373, whereas Basil lived until the 1st of January in the year 379. It is true that among the Greek works credited to Ephraim there survives a speech in praise of Basil, which seems to be genuine. This, however, is not to be taken as a eulogy delivered after Basil’s death, but rather as a speech of praise in which the living man is addressed directly. We may safely conclude that the story, resting as it does on a mistaken chronology, is itself a fiction. But the story of Ephraim’s helpful intervention and work in a time of famine, which is undated and is attested early, may well be accepted as true and assigned to the winter of 372 to 373. The authorities who give 373 as the date of his death place it in the month of Haziran, that is, June. We may reasonably guess that the efforts and anxieties of the famine season had told too heavily on a body already worn by years and by excessive austerities, and so had hastened his end.